Donald Trump And Aggression

Is Trump Making Men More Aggressive?

In the eyes of most observers, the new President of the United States has divided his own country, angered half the world and inspired even more bile and spite on Twitter than you normally find there. But is The Donald actually making us more aggressive?

These researchers think he might be.

It’s long been well-attested that events in the news can impact directly on people’s personal behaviour (one particularly depressing piece of academic research in 2013 showed that domestic violence increases dramatically whenever England play a football match). However, what’s not been claimed until now is that the behaviour of a specific individual could be altering group behaviour.

However, that’s at least part of the conclusion reached by new research from Wharton University – that the election of Donald Trump has altered social norms for the worse. The findings stem from a research project conducted in the business economics and public policy school, where Wharton academics were looking at differences in communications styles between men and women.

Specifically, the team were looking at how a person’s negotiation tactics change depending on the gender of the person that they are interacting with. Post-election, they recorded a marked change in tactics among participants, who became “less cooperative, more likely to use adversarial strategies and less likely to reach an agreement with a partner. The effect was driven by an increase in men acting more aggressively toward women.”

What’s interesting here is that the researchers weren’t looking for the impact the new President had on the way men negotiated with women – it was a byproduct of an ongoing test. “We didn’t know Trump was going to be elected; we didn’t set out to study Trump’s election,” says Wharton business economics and public policy professor Corrine Low who led the research. “We had the [lab experiment] sessions on the calendar already, and post-election, we looked at the data and saw that people’s behaviour was profoundly different.”

The research sessions saw men and women playing a game in which they had to divide $20 with a partner through a series of negotiations, some of which had them aware of their partner’s gender, and others where a chat tool was used to maintain anonymity. Each stage allowed for three options – a 15/5 split, or both parties walking away with nothing if no compromise was reached. Prior to the election, men were more likely to display a degree of chivalry and good manners when negotiating with a woman, whereas afterwards “we could see a turning of the tide, and suddenly men are more aggressive.”

This matters for reasons beyond the obvious implications for social cohesion. Mainly that despite us living in a society which celebrates an aggressive approach towards business and negotiating (see the UK government’s “no deal is better than a bad deal” starting position on the Article 50 negotiations, for example), it’s actually not that efficient a way of doing business. The Wharton research noted that as participants became more aggressive, fewer compromises were reached and so more money was left on the table and payoffs went down. “People’s behaviour changed in a way that was less productive,” said Low.

This is especially pertinent right now, as wherever you look, anger and intransigence seems to be the default position: the American writer Charles Clymer wrote a recent post that examined how powerful a driver of Conservative thought “white rage” was in national politics; even those who won the Brexit vote seem permanently furious about it; Jon Ronson wrote an entire book about how one misplaced comment online can see someone publicly “shamed”; while some analysts contest that Twitter’s whole business model might be threatened by the fact that using it now often feels akin to lurking around the fringes of a screaming argument in a pub car park.

Whether we like it or not, the world is getting more networked, more connected and faster moving. Being able to negotiate different viewpoints, compromise with people and adapt to different ways of thinking isn’t some display of “beta” weakness, but an essential skill for thriving. Sadly, our political systems seem to be encouraging the opposite from the top down, with no care for what this means for our society or economy.

“It appears that whatever Trump represents – that rhetorical style, that presence – seems to have consequences for other people’s behaviours. (There’s) anecdotal evidence that words matter,” Low says, “and what we have is lab evidence that this matters.”